Barbara Hammer, two-night survey(1974-2011)

September 4 7:00 pm – September 5 7:00 pm

Tickets

Barbara Hammer, Two-Night Survey

“the filmmaker who almost single handedly defined lesbian cinema.” – So Mayer for BFI

Friday, Sept 4, 7pm (1974–1976): Menses, Dyketactics, Superdyke, Women I Love

Saturday, Sept 5, 7 pm (1978–2011): Double Strength, Sync Touch, No No Nooky T.V., Maya Deren’s Sink

Barbara Hammer picked up a camera in the early 1970s because the lesbian life she was living didn’t exist anywhere on screen, and spent the next four decades making sure it did.

Night one moves through her raw, hand-processed early work, made outside the visual language men had built for looking at women’s bodies; Dyketactics, widely considered one of the first lesbian films, remains the clearest statement of that refusal. Night two turns to Hammer’s later, more formally rigorous experiments, films like Sync Touch and No No Nooky T.V. that trade urgency for a deeper interrogation of touch, sound, and structure, tracking how an artist who began by simply insisting on visibility grew into one of experimental film’s most restless technical innovators.

“Her prolific body of work, produced over five decades, is one that significantly shaped queer art history. Her radical aesthetics articulated new forms of lesbian identity, community, and sexuality, amidst the prevalent heteronormative (and almost exclusively male) gaze and narrative forms… The quest for visibility was fundamental to Hammer’s œuvre at a time when gay women artists had few if any points of reference.”
— Ada Maria Hennel, “Barbara Hammer (1939–2019): Texte zur Kunst, April 10, 2019

Friday, September 4th, 7pm, 1974–1976